I Think You're Totally Wrong A Quarrel [Paperback]

Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life; his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art. The stay-at-home dad (three young girls) and the workaholic writer (eighteen books) head to the woods to spend four days together in a cabin, arguing life vs. art.

I Think You’re Totally Wrongis an impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate. Shields and Powell talk about everything—marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal, and (of course) writers and writing—in the name of exploring and debating their central question: the lived life versus the examined life. There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters of the universe—only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish.


James Franco’s film adaptation ofI Think You’re Totally Wrong, starring the authors, premiered in 2015.

“Outrageously entertaining . . . a warm, funny, and charming book that questions not only what it means to live for art, but what it means to live.”—Saul Austerlitz,Boston Globe 

Hugely entertaining. —John Murawski, Raleigh News & Observer

“A daring descent into the ‘chasm of uncertainty.’”—Matt Seidel, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Start readingI Think You’re Totally Wrong, then try to stop; I dare you. It screws with your head in a way you can’t shake off, and it’s moving—weirdly moving. It ruined my work day. I loved it. Shields is opening up new ways to be a writer.”—Walter Kirn

“I Think You’re Totally Wronghelped make sense of the strange rigors of life as I know it—the balalƒò